“Big things always start small”—This wisdom also applies to microelectronic design. And it is at the beginning of the design process, when the complexity is still small and can well be understood under different aspects, that the important decisions are made, which will lead to success or failure. Once a design has been developed to a large structure of logic and wires, it is difficult to cure problems, which in many cases also started small and eventually became large, hard to solve without major design re-spins—costing months of design time, major engineering resources and can be responsible for missed marketing opportunities.
According to [Ref. 1: Jones, H., Analysis of the Relationship between EDA Expenditures and Competitive Positioning of IC Vendors, IDS, 2002.] 85% of all design projects finish late if they finish at all. The same source states that all projects are late by 53% of the originally estimated design time. Gartner/Dataquest reported about the number of designs iterations and the design time. From these data one can estimate the average design time for current designs to be about 10 months and the expected design time for next designs to be about 15 months. One can also estimate from this report that an average of 4.7 design iterations is needed to complete a design. One could easily conclude that the NRE costs are not determined by the increasing mask costs but rather by the design costs. One could also conclude that the design community is pessimistic with regard to design efforts for new.
If one assumes that the average employment cost for a design engineer in high cost regions is about $200k and the additional cost for EDA licenses is about $30k, then about ⅓ of the total design cost (or about $70k per design engineer) is spent due to unexpected design iterations. These are typically due to late detection of design errors or because problems are found at a very late stage of the design process. Even worse, these delays often cause missed market opportunities if competition is able to enter the market earlier and gains large market shares during the most profitable market window. A delay in market entry of six months can result in reduced revenues of up toe 50%. In conclusion, delays and unnecessary design iterations cost the industry tens of billions of dollars each year.
The reasons for the large number of design iterations are manifold: less predictable semiconductor fabrication processes, more aspects to be considered, complexity of the designs. However, there is one common issue among these reasons: the problems are detected too late. Months of tedious design time had already been spent and many CPU-hours of verification had been used to refine the design and verify certain aspects.